Comments on: Language revitalization and radical politics

By: Global Coalition for Language Rights – Language on the Move

Global Coalition for Language Rights – Language on the Move — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 05:20:01 +0000

[…] We are currently working to create a set of multilingual principles and practices for the organization, which we aim to have in place before we begin planning Global Language Advocacy Day 2023. Doing so is part of the coalition’s prefigurative practices, i.e., those based on the idea that we should try to ‘create the sought-after forms of justice in the process of achieving structural transformation: to p….’ […]

By: Beyond bilingual education in Tibet | United Nations For Tibet

Beyond bilingual education in Tibet | United Nations For Tibet — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 05:07:41 +0000

[…] revolution, greater inclusion for Indigenous and minoritised languages has always been won through political struggle: on the streets, in the courts, in the pages of newspapers and academic scholarship, in classrooms, […]

By: Beyond bilingual education in Tibet – Asia Dialogue

Beyond bilingual education in Tibet – Asia Dialogue — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 17:13:44 +0000

By: Joe Lo Bianco

Joe Lo Bianco — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 20:48:36 +0000

Great post Gerald. It is the case that many/most academics live in a cotton wool space of privilege. Relative to the “real world” (notice the scare quotes, shouldn’t be needed but in fact are needed. Says lots.) Some/lots of “Radical politics” is like “applied” Linguistics, or, even worse, “language policy and planning”, ie theorisation of action rather than theorisation for and in action. In fact a lot of praxis for language change and justice has been and continues to be done, by and in immigrant and indigenous communities, but because academics sometimes think things don’t exist or cannot be known until one of them has labeled those things and written an article about those things (practices or understandings about language oppression, for example) what comes to count as true tend to be only the academic accounts of what is true.

By: Robert Phillipson

Robert Phillipson — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 09:25:24 +0000

This is an extremely important blog by Gerald. What is ironical is that a solid academic book that in its essence is subversive has been published by Routledge, which is a significant beneficiary of and contributor to an indefensible, exploitative capitalist system.
Routledge, alongside Taylor and Francis, is part of the large Informa group, which has four divisions, one of which is academic publishing. I checked the Informa website and studied Annual Reports a couple of years ago. Unlike the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge, Informa is on the stock exchange. It proudly proclaims its commitment to bridging business and academia. Its profits are high, and rise year by year. Doubtless Macmillan, Pearson, Springer and others operate in a similar way.
Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and I were commissioned three years ago by Routledge to compile four volumes on Language Rights. We compiled 1668 pages in four volumes, consisting of many items published earlier from a wide range of scholarly disciplines (law, politics, education, minorities etc.), a few newly commissioned ones, a general introduction by ourselves, and an introduction to each of the four thematic volumes. These were initially priced at £900, which we were dismayed at, and only in hardback, with a print-run of only 200 copies. We were not aware either that the price could be so astronomical, or that so few copies would be produced when we took on the task. Our contract did not stipulate that. Since registering these shocks (and after an infuriating, time-wasting process of proof reading, caused by their incompetence) we were in touch with friends who have edited comparable ‘mini-libraries’, Nancy Hornberger (Educational Linguistics), Tom Ricento (Language Policy and Planning) and Ingrid Piller (Language and Migration), as well as a colleague in phonetics, Inger Mees. Nancy and Tom agreed with us that Routledge’s policy in this area is counter-productive, and prevents thousands of people worldwide from having access to the books.
Publishing policy for academia is tricky and messy, and academics need to be aware of whose interests our products are serving. Nor is there anything new about the ‘repressive tolerance’ of revolutionary books being published by corporations which compete in the market so as to serve the interests of share-holders. ResearchGate and Academia are outlets of major importance, even if there are awkward copyright issues. The Language on the Move blog is an extremely important forum for raising awareness of these complexities.
In the language policy field, Tove coined the term linguicism over 40 years ago, linking language marginalisation with racism, sexism, and classism explicitly in her radical writings, which have invariably been integrated with grassroots activism with oppressed groups. These are ongoing concerns, as are policies at several levels to combat linguistic imperialism.